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MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



HON. FRANK J. CANNON, 

OF UTAH, 
UPON THE LIFE AND CHARACTER 



HON. JOSEPH H. EARLE 

(Late a Senator from the State of South Carolina), 



DELIVERED IN THE 



SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, 



Jv^EARCH 29, 1898, 



WASHINGXOM. 
1898. 



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08O45 



MEMORIAL ADDRESS ON THE LIFE AND CHARACTER 
OF HON. JOSEPH H. EARLE. 



Mr. CANNON. Mr. President, Joseph H. Earle, the soldier, 
the Senator, has answered the last roll call of this world. If the 
bravery of his career on earth is any assurance of the composure 
with which he will confront the judgment seat, we may well be- 
lieve that he will stand there serene in the strength which knows 
no faltering, willing to receive the appointed decree for all the 
thoughts and all the words and all the deeds which ma,rked his 
little day on earth. It is a splendid hope that the grandest quality 
of the human soul— steadfastness — can not be lost in the transi- 
tion from this life of death to the deathless life. 

Greater than the affection which prompts us to devote this hour 
to an expression of eulogy for the citizen departed, for the friend 
e^ gone to the other Mansion, for the battle-nerved arm qiiieted in 
jr the coffin, for the honest voice stilled in the soft nighttime of the 
grave, is the duty upon us to pause in this solemn instant in our 
country's career and contemplate the brevity of munJane experi- 
ence and the speeding toward us all of that sunset hour when 
earthly hope and earthly life are enveloped in the shadows. The 
sense of death hallows the judgment of men and sanctifies the 
purpose of nations. 

Let us in this view of our larger duty devote to this memorial 
service the time which belongs to the country. Joseph H. Earle 
and his fellow-Senators met in this official sphere as birds meet 
at sea, giving but the signal of a fluttered wing as they drive 
along through swirling tempests, and scarcely pausing to turn an 
eye to watch each other's flight bej-ond opposed horizons. I knew 
this departed one but briefly; and yet admiringly, for he was a 
soldier-gentleman, so considerate of all the high requirements of 
social and official intercourse that every contact with him seemed 
but to more endear him to his fellows. I knew him best as the 
31t3 3 



reconciled representative of a reconciled people — as one who felt 
that the Cause for which he had offered his life was won when it 
was lost. 

No words from human lips can add to the dignity of that epi- 
taph which his own career has written: Joseph H. Earle, the 
orphaned lad, offering his heart's best blood to the State he loved; 
Joseph H. Earle, the United States Senator, offering his souls 
best thought to the people of the country which he loved more. 
That which we can say must be for the comfort of remaining hu- 
manity and not to bless him. It is an instructive thought that 
not all the words which earthly pens can trace, nor all the senti- 
ments which human lips can utter, can add one jot to or take one 
tittle frcym the character which was the formation of his 50 j^ears 
as we count earthlj^ time. 

He was a man. And in this one man was folded all the uni- 
verse, with its dark abysms of eternal silence, its immeasurable 
spaces filled with the mysteries of unknowing and unknown; and 
with all its lighted worlds of heavenly harmony, its precessional 
march of infinite power, and its sublimer mj^stery of some time 
knowing all as we are known. 

As the breathing flower, as the wind-stirred leaf, as the upspriug- 
ing grass blade contains within its tiny self the problem of pro- 
gression and its solving, and as it has its individual and impreg- 
nable identity amidst all its fellows; so man, every man, bears 
within himself, in the illumination of his soul, the possibility of 
all knowledge, all virtue, all law by which the universe is and is 
governed, all processes by which the worlds are framed, and, in 
its darker chambers, all the possibilities of woe and destruction 
and infinite gloom— and he has his own individuality, in which, 
through all the eternity, there can not come the unholy intrusion 
of any other essence. 

This order is not complex; it is of all things most plain — that 
man of his Creator born, the chief of all things created, is of the 
creative power an eternal part. From him, in earthly life, spring 
the majesty of nations and the downfall of dynasties. If we 
could know of that hidden thing, the first man, and could lay 
bare to finite knowledge the wonder of his xiossibilities, we 
would see that in him was the germ of all that was to be — the 

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song of love and the shriek of hate; the whisper of peace and the 
trump of war; the crucifixion and the crucified; the home of hope 
where innocence with instinct supernatural calls all things good 
because they are, and because they are of God, and the slaugh- 
ter pen of infamy, where innocence perishes, doubting of mercy 
because it seems to be withheld, and doubting of mercy's God 
because He does not seem to speak; the palace and the hovel; 
the plenty and content which flow from wisdom, and the want 
and degradation which come of laws denied; the liberty-crowned 
domes beneath which freemen speak for freemen, and the dungeons 
of the secret tyranny; the fight of savage men to overcome a 
savage earth; the triumph of that intellect which, in the evolu- 
tion of this life, has grown too large for the limitations of our 
poor measure of time and space; the unions and the revolutions; 
the wandering stars, gathered into one field of blue and made 
the flag of a consecrated people, inspired with a holy purpose to 
redeem the world for its exaltation as a heavenly home. All 
good, all evil, are his. It is the whisper of his own immortality 
that asks him on to deathless deeds; it is the clog of his own 
earthliness that holds him in the mire of things that die in their 
doing. As immortality step by step conquers the earthliness, the 
man of the now is risiflg into realms of greater light, and 
upon him is dawning the day of reflected infinite knowledge that 
peace and order are the law of that universe of which he holds 
the essence. To this end he is marching, led on by inspiration, 
led on by that eternal impulsion which makes the generations go 
from good things unto better; until— surmounting all— from him, 
in eternal life, springs the majesty of worlds, peopled and glorious. 
In every evolution which has marked his passage he can see, if 
he will, the unassailable certainty of that eternal time for him. 
Earthly evolution is but the type of spiritual evolution. It is the 
monition of a lesson which we sometimes try to forget, but which 
comes to us in the silent watches of the night, in the hour of lone- 
liness at sea, by the bedside of friends departing, and, more 
sacredly and certainly than all, in the hope to meet again the 
friends already gone. 

This life, as a part of the eternity to which it belongs, is not even 
as a speck of cosmic dust to the infinite space to which it reddens 

3183 



6 

under the crimson sun. There is a future, as there was a past. 
As the past is lost to our remembrance lest we lose our energy by 
retrospection, so the future is mercifully hidden from us lest we 
rush from life with heedless haste or feel a saddened discontent 
with earth. But that it is, and that it is forever, as it was forever, 
all the best moments of man bear witness. 

No human soul is satisfied with the hopeless horror of oblivion. 
To have emerged froru nothingness, to have gasped this earthly 
air for the fretting instant of a fretted human life, and then to 
have plunged into nothingness is to have been of a humanity 
damned from birth to death with causeless, useless struggle in a 
wretched world of nothingness. The grave is not extinction; it 
is the door of home; it is God's portal through which we pass 
from this little light of life to the greater light of a better life. 
Just so surely as we live to die, just so surely do wo only die 
to live. 

Doubt of eternal life would be a self-inflicted cruelty, if there 
were room for doubt. But this is true: It is either oblivion before 
we were, nothingness now, and oblivion after we are, or it is life 
forever. Of these two, every man from whom a dearer than him- 
self has passed away vdll, in the holiest chamber of his thought, be- 
neath the stony front which he presents to all the world, hold fast 
the hope which is knowledge, that it is life forever. 

Earthly science has its vast domain, in which it triumphs and 

subdues; but beyond the measure of its widening achievements, 

and beyond the bounded realm of certainty, abides the unbounded 

realm of holy faith. Passing all comfort that mortality can 

give — balm to the wounded heart, sustenance to the poverty 

stricken, justice to the oppressed, benediction to the orphaned 

and the widowed and all who mourn, is the prophetic vision which 

stands for us through the ages: 

Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, 
and the earth shall cast out the dead. 

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